The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg (The Quantum Curators, #1)

by Eva St. John

One minute, Roman rules, the next, hello Dark Ages. And not so much dark, as, for fuck’s sake, you used to have underfloor heating, how could you let that go?

Often the most dangerous parts of the extraction were not the volcanoes, earthquakes, or the gangsters, but the simple laws of quantum mechanics. Anything could happen, and usually did.

He secretly thought of himself as an Indiana Jones of the library stacks.

There was one principal difference between the two men; Charlie went out and acquired the stuff from the darkest corners of the globe, while Julius waited until someone placed it in front of him.

The Library of Alexandria was one facet of our mouseion complex, and I might be biased, but our mouseion was the best in the world given that it was home to all the unique and lost items from Beta Earth. There isn’t a Beta comparison, as their museums are a pale shadow of the glories of a proper mouseion. Each branch was split into the nine muses, so we had the library department, the art department, the music department, the artefact department… Well, you get it. And all are currently being filled up with specimens from Beta Earth.

The theory was that our earth and their earth parted at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. At least that’s what the philosophers and scientists suggest. They also postulate that if we have one parallel universe, we can have a myriad. There could be earths where the dinosaurs were never wiped out; there could be earths where mankind never got going; there could be earths where mankind had already become extinct; there could even be earths where putting milk in your tea first was acceptable.

Along with nation-building, religion had been given a stern talking to. If people wanted to believe in gods, then all well and good, but if it couldn’t be proved then it wasn’t to leave the front door.

So many times, massive secrets were discovered behind mundane facts and figures.

Live events were treasured. You could play fast and loose with the timeline as there was less to screw up. They were also high risk, with a greater chance of failure or death, and a greater chance of glory. No wonder we were all leaning forward in our seats. The Q Field was capable of letting us through to any place on Beta Earth in any time zone, but sometimes it lined up with Beta Earth at the same time we were currently at, hence a live event.

In his experience, you never tackled a problem from one angle only. You always tackled what was known and what was unknown. And whenever possible, you always started with primary sources. Which were not books, or websites or newspaper articles, but people.

He wanted to portray money, not desperation. It was a known fact that people will give more money to people that look as though they don’t need it.

Not all who’d fled were innocents.

‘Time smooths out most things. Plus, some people cling onto their accents, as though it is all they have left of the old country. If they loved the motherland so much, why leave?’ Philip lifted his palms and shrugged. The perfect immigrant.

Clearly, Alpha Earth is the better version, but we seem to miss that spark that creates the extraordinary, or maybe it just stands out more here because of all the awfulness. One thing we had less of in Alpha was the sublime. If we drew something, it was pretty, and people appreciated it. On Beta, the painting was imbued with passion, with blood and fear, with rapture and awe. We just didn’t do those extremes. And in our culture, that showed. Maybe that’s why we appreciated Beta’s stuff more than they did.

And that’s why we have teams. One person can never see both sides of a coin at the same time.

‘Ah, now who can understand the hypocrisy of the human soul?